Andela provides the human compute layer behind modern AI systems – training models, deploying AI-native engineers and upskilling the teams that build them. In 2021, they closed their Series E and have now raised $381M in venture funding. For founder and Emerge VP Christina Sass, the focus is on how you communicate your vision as you grow.
This interview was part of a series called Product-Market Fit Academy, run by Emerge in conjunction with our Venture Partner community – operators who have founded and led the biggest businesses in our market, including Duolingo, Udemy, Beamery, HiBob, WalkMe and OpenAI, representing a combined $1tn in market cap.
Here is what founders will get out of this conversation with Christina:
- That to find product-market fit you need to focus on value as well as vision
- When and how you need to bring in others into the team
- A framework for thinking about your own strengths and weaknesses
- How to understand the kinds of work you should be focusing on at various stages of growth
- Some tactics for avoiding some of the common pitfalls
* * *
“We had a lot of external validation. External validation is amazing! And it’s also really confusing.”
Christina Sass is thinking back to 2018.
Andela had just raised a Series B from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, with Mark Zuckerberg paying them a personal visit at their office in Lagos. “It allowed us to do a lot of things,” she says. “But what it wasn’t was product-market fit. It was a lot of great recognition for an incredible vision.”
Andela’s inspiring vision is for a world where the most talented people can build careers commensurate with their ability, not their race, gender or geography. They launched in 2014 and by 2018 had built an amazing position on the supply side of their marketplace with a footprint of more than 1,000 developers in six African countries.
“The world took notice! The problem was that VPs of Engineering at enterprise-level companies did not,” says Christina wryly. “Our developers were not flying off the shelf.” Andela had a product-market fit problem on the demand side.
“Vision, vision, vision, all day long. A world where amazing talent can do these amazing things!” she says, remembering their pitch. “But the directors of engineering that we were sitting in front of were saying things like, ‘I need a product feature yesterday. I’m over budget. I’m inspired by what you’re saying but this is not my reality today.’”
Fast forward a few years and Andela now has more than 210,000 developers in their network. Crucially, they also now have 200 enterprise customers hiring as many as 30 engineers at one time. And, for some, they are the solution to sourcing and matching all of their technologists.
So how did they go from a vision that resonated strongly but a product that failed to connect with customers, to finding a solution that brought their incredible vision to life and also met the immediate unmet needs of their customers?
Much of this boiled down to communication and her own focus as a founder.
The right vision in all the wrong places
“When a branding expert starts his presentation with a slide called ‘tough love’, you know you’ve got to pour yourself some whiskey and get ready!” says Christina. This was the first moment the team properly started to understand their issue.
The problem was that they were starting with vision, when they needed to start with value.
“There’s two levels people buy into. A brand identity: that’s an idea. And a product: the thing that people actually buy,” explains Christina. “We started out the gate swinging with a huge brand identity. But did not meet our customer where they were, which was the actual product that they needed. They need rational features and tangible results.”
This realisation enabled them to start to quickly ‘flip the pyramid’. “We immediately changed the language of how our sales team sold the product,” she remembers. “We have these amazing people. Here’s how they rank. They know Ruby on Rails. And here’s what they can deliver in the first 6 months.”
But this was just one symptom of what Christina recognised to be a bigger issue. “An extraordinary vision can confuse a lot of people if you don’t see how it fits into a larger path and journey,” she says.
Thankfully, she was introduced to a framework to help her identify and think through what to do, with the help of her executive coach Jeff Hunter, founder of Talentism. He’s coached the founders of Compass, Better, Cadre, Capsule Pax, Oscar, Shift and more, and has developed a framework to help founders at early stage companies to grow. “I cannot recommend coaching enough,” she says. “It changed our path.”
Things to apply:
- When speaking to customers, lead with the value that your product delivers, then back it up with a strong vision
- Consider getting a coach to help you think through what you should be doing as a founder
The Four Ds framework
The ‘Four D’s is a framework that describes the different kinds of work that you need to do as a founder: Do, Decide, Design and Decode. As you grow, you need to move your focus from the left to the right.
“Another way to think about this is: Do is an individual contributor, Decide is a manager, and Design is an architect, architecting the machine,” explains Christina. “Decode is the visionary.”
Do:
At the early stage you are firmly in ‘Do’ mode. “You are the product visionary, you are the janitor, you are HR doing it all. It’s the freakin’ best!” Christina says. “There’s just so much fun at those early stages. But you are a critical individual contributor, perhaps the only individual contributor.”
Decide:
The next step is ‘Decide’. That’s the management function. “Broad generalisation: most founders spike at Do and Decode,” reckons Christina. “You may be the odd founder out there that is an extraordinary manager. Most of us are not. Most of us wildly overestimate the ability to which we can manage.”
She clarifies and reinforces her point: “Excellent managers are motivated by the success of others. Period. They get up in the morning to have the success of their team be their success. They are constantly clarifying your immediate goals. They are thinking about all the ways we need to communicate to that team. So it’s not a confusing signal. When you reprioritise, they’re very systematically thinking about how to communicate the reprioritisation to their team in a way that it makes sense,” she pauses. “If what I described is not you, then you are probably not spiking on management.”
But she says, you don’t have to. “Don’t go to management school. Hire a great manager.”
Design:
Design is about being a systems-level thinker. “It’s very hard for most founders to make the jump from delegating to designing the machine,” she says. “When you delegate, you’re saying, here’s the stuff that needs to get done. But designing the machine at a higher level, you’re thinking in quarters, you’re thinking in half a year. How do all of these systems fit together?”
Decode:
Decode is everywhere because it’s about the vision. “It’s almost like it should be a layer that sits under the others,” she says. This is about understanding how you are going to win. “You’re looking at where the market is going? What is happening? What is the future going to look like? If the thing we are building were to succeed, what’s that look like?”
Things to apply:
- Reflect on your own strengths and weaknesses. In which of the ‘Ds’ are you strongest? Do you fit the stereotype of indexing on ‘Do’ and ‘Decode’?
- To Decode, make sure that you have a clear idea of where the market is going and how you will ‘win’
Shifting contexts
Christina says that the context changes typically when you raise money. This is because it’s when your team grows.
“It’s drastic when it goes from 15 to 50 people,” she says. “And it’s really drastic when you go from working with people who are your best friends and cofounders to a sea of people with 20 to 25 years experience. All these are massive context shifts.”
These shifts are the points you need to move through the different kinds of work and timescales that you focus on.
The first shift is from ‘I do’ to ‘You need to do’. “One of the reasons why we hammer home the need for good management is that a great manager knows how to take high-level goals and communicate them on a regular basis to a group of people in order to achieve things through them,” Christina explains.
The next is from ‘You need to do’ to ‘This is how it works’. “When you’re designing the machine, you need people who hold a clear idea of how this thing should work,” she says. “They need to know what excellence looks like. And then be able to put a team in place that can achieve those goals.”
The final shift is from ‘This is how it works’ to ‘This is how we win’. “This is how each department should work if we’re all working together in order to win,” she says. “This is how this company outcompetes our competitors or other products that may come in the marketplace and might threaten us.”
Things to apply:
- Reflect on which context you are in. Are you focusing on the right ‘D’ and timescale?
- Once you have identified where you are, decide what you need to do to change the emphasis of where you spend your time and what you do
Problems to anticipate
There are some common problems to anticipate as you grow. “Here’s a preview of your future pain,” she grins. “You’re welcome!”
The Founder’s Dilemma
“You see the future. You are great at decoding. And you’re great at doing that one thing that you do,” describes Christina. “But you don’t love telling others what to do.” This is the classic management gap.
Then there’s not seeing the need for Design: “‘What should this department look like, how does it operate?’ That question annoys you. You’re like, I don’t know! Just… do it!”
And, finally, confusing everyone by flipping between Decode and Do. “You jump between this is our future state and our amazing vision, and I’m just gonna get in and do the thing I love to do. You confuse the hell out of people,” says Christina. “They say ‘I understand your vision for the future. I buy into it. That’s why I took this job. But I literally just need to know what we need to do for next quarter.’”
Management gap
The next common problem is not properly filling in behind you with a team you trust.
“You’re obsessed with that thing that you’re good at. The Sales-CEOs is a classic. You’re down for the quarter, so you just jump in and you run over your head of sales. You don’t listen to them. You cut corners. You’re calling all your buddies. They’re like, ‘wait a second, I put processes in place. Now all my sales team is following what you’re doing, not what I said to do!’” She winces.
“When you’re a great individual contributor, you often will bring a rock star and then you will cut the knees out from under that rock star by not actually giving them autonomy,” she says. “When you drop down like that, it’s often not clear to everybody why you’re having a drop down and that you don’t want to be doing that often. There can be a lot of confusion there.”
Stuck at Decider
Her final example is about failing to design the machine. “You should be the dumbest person in the room except for where you spike very highly,” reckons Christina. The problems come when you don’t want to give up control. “Your leaders will get confused if you don’t let them make decisions. All sorts of flavours of pain come with that.”
Things to apply:
- Reflect on your experience. Do you recognise any of the symptoms that Christina describes? Be honest!
- What do the symptoms you’re seeing suggest about your strengths and weaknesses?
How to solve it
If you’re seeing some of those symptoms, how do you fix it? Or better still, how do you avoid it in the first place? Christina sums up by giving her top tips on how to address these issues as you grow.
Backfill at each stage
The first thing is to build a team you trust below you. “You got to backfill. Not half-backfill with ‘I’m gonna hire an assistant!’”
She says it’s a balance between working out what you can afford and which skills you prioritise bringing in. Then it’s about being thoughtful about letting those people you hire really own the things that you own and making sure that your team trusts them too by onboarding them properly. “It’s building a layer of core folks that you trust and that you have a working relationship with behind you.”
Explore your strengths and blind spots
Christina says you need to understand your own strengths and where you risk confusing your team. She recommends regular 360s as an easy way to do this. And then design your role and responsibilities around it.
“That is also a bit like product-market fit: it can change over time,” she warns. “Maybe you can be the visionary and lead a product team. But then eventually, if you’re big enough, you’re going to need someone to lead your product team. And then it’s critical that they maximise you as an individual contributor, and that you don’t confuse them or take autonomy and authority away from them and their ability to build a well functioning department.”
Design around what you are like
So there are common patterns. But every founder is unique. “Your fears from childhood and how they show up with you as a CEO are entirely unique to you,” says Christina.
If you’re not a manager, put a manager in your design. “If you’re a product visionary, then you really have to figure out who’s designing the rest of the machine.” She again points out that it’s not necessarily you that needs to do this kind of work. But to scale, it has to get done.
Put the vision into context
Finally, you need to be realistic about where people are and orientate them to why they are pursuing specific goals. She refers back to their initial product-market fit problem, where they led with the vision but forgot about the value.
“Think of the vision as a tool that you can wield like any other tool for good or for bad,” she advises. “You’ve got to learn where it is appropriate and how you bring everyone along.”
Things to apply:
- Reflect on your team. Do you have the people you need? And have you properly onboarded them and built trust?
- Ask for 360 feedback and explore where you might be confusing your team.
- Consider what are the things that you do well personally? What is the negative space around you that you need to fill?
- Think about what your team needs. How is your vision useful to them to help them with their immediate challenges?
If you can do all that, Christina reckons you’ve got a winning formula.
“We got our sh*t together! Today we are a world class marketplace for both sides. Our alumni are out there doing all things in the world!” she smiles. “But, it was that process of understanding ourselves and designing well around that understanding, that unlocked the vision to become a reality.”
